Friendship (7 page)

Soon the sushi was gone and they were on their third plastic cups of wine. Amy felt almost too tired to talk, so she listened to Bev, who was telling her about the latest terrible thing her boss had done:

“It wasn’t even that she claimed credit for my work. I mean, that’s what I’m there for, I’m her assistant. It was that she wanted me to continue the fiction when we weren’t even in the meeting anymore, when we were just alone in her office. She wanted me to congratulate her on the great idea she’d had for the subtitle! If I felt like being really self-destructive, I’d have called her out on it, but it’s just not worth it. She’d just pretend she had no idea what I was talking about, and then she’d be angry at me for a week and take it out on me by deliberately leaving me off some crucial scheduling email, then having a screaming fit when she arrived at the wrong restaurant to have lunch with Marcia Gay Harden or whatever C-lister she’s currently courting.”

“I think you should call her out on it, regardless of the consequences. If you don’t assert yourself, if you just keep being the world’s best assistant, you’ll never get promoted,” Amy said.

“If my boss despises me, I’ll never get promoted.”

“Ahh, a catch-twenty-two.”

Bev pulled out a pack of Camel Lights, Amy’s favorite brand of cigarettes. Neither of them really smoked, but when Bev pretend smoked, she bought Parliaments. The Camels were another kind gesture on her part, like the wine and the sushi. They lit cigarettes and smoked with exaggerated seriousness, enjoying the ritual of the burst of flame, the first puff of smoke dissipating into the night air.

“I have something I need to ask you, and I’m afraid it’ll be awkward,” Bev said, speaking quickly. They were still facing the highway, not looking at each other, but Amy snuck a glance at Bev’s face. Bev seemed tense but resolute.

“Okay, what is it?”

“Well, you know, growing up where I did, I was often considered kind of an odd duck. I mean, I wasn’t a total social reject. I always had a couple of people to, like, eat lunch with in the cafeteria, but I definitely never had a best friend, and I’m not sure how it works.”

“How what works?”

“Like, becoming best friends. Do you have to say something, confirming that you’re best friends?”

“Are you asking me whether we’re best friends?”

“Well, yeah. I assume you’ve had a best friend before, so you know, generally, how it goes.”

Amy thought about it for a second. “I’ve had close friends, for sure. But mostly I’ve had boyfriends. You always think they’re your best friend, but that’s obviously bullshit.”

“Yeah. If you’re having sex with someone, they’re not your best friend.”

Their cigarettes were almost done; Amy poured a little bit of wine into one of the empty plastic soy sauce cups and stubbed hers out in this makeshift ashtray so as not to further befoul her new deck. “Is this … are we having the DTR conversation?”

“The … wait, let me guess what it stands for. Determining … No. Defining? Defining The Relationship?”

“Yeah!” said Amy.

“Yeah, we are. Sorry, I just … Look, it’s okay if you don’t feel the same way. But you’re my best friend. And I guess I just wanted you to know that. No pressure! Ha!”

Bev’s tone was casual, but when Amy stole another glance in her direction, she looked pained.

“Bev, of course you’re my best friend. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say anything, but you are, for sure. I’d be lost without you. Like tonight, for example. I would have died of starvation, or gotten a second wind and tried to unpack boxes and then died of exhaustion. Or I would have gotten paranoid and barricaded the door with my one stick of furniture. Before you came over, I was feeling so unsafe here. Not for any good reason, but just because I felt alone. And now that you’ve been here, even when you go home, I won’t feel that way. I feel safe now because I know someone knows where I am and gives a fuck.”

“And it won’t change when you get a new boyfriend?”

“No. Will it change when you get a boyfriend?”

“No, and anyway, it’s impossible to imagine that happening.”

Amy shook the wine bottle, determined that there was still a little bit left, and divided it equally between their glasses. “Well, we’re still relatively young, you know? I’m sure all kinds of unimaginable things will happen.”

9

Several years full of unimaginable things later, Bev and Amy were lazing around in a borrowed beautiful house. They woke up late, and when they began to feel bored, around noon, they went out for lunch and a hike in Balsam Lake Mountain Wild Forest.

They started at the visitors’ center, where Bev talked to the park ranger about which would be the best hike for them considering their fitness level and the amount of time they had and which of the park’s attractions they would most like to see from the scenic overlooks. The park ranger and Bev instantaneously discovered that they were both fluent speakers of the language of useful people who are accustomed to communicating a lot of information simply and effectively to strangers. Amy had known this language at one point but had mostly forgotten it, in the same way she had forgotten her high school French.

Bev and the forest ranger looked at maps, and Amy stayed out of their way, wandering around in the visitors’ center, examining a slightly threadbare taxidermied owl, a chart that explained what the national park had looked like three thousand years ago, and some rusty pieces of metal that, at some impossible-to-imagine time in the past, had been the height of technology. Reading the word “technology” caused Amy to realize that she had left her iPhone in the car. She itched for it, just slightly.

When they reached the mouth of the trail, they paused as Bev squinted at the map. “So we kind of loop around the park; it goes next to the road for a little while, and then it’s a pretty steep climb up to the top of this hill. That guy called it a mountain, but he was being kind of generous, I think. The elevation gain is only five hundred feet. And then it goes back and around behind the visitors’ center. Anyway, it’s much shorter on the way down,” Bev said, basically to herself.

“Cool, that sounds great.”

And they set off, with Bev in front.

*   *   *

AT FIRST AMY
tried to make conversation, but then—a little belatedly—she sensed that Bev wasn’t super interested in talking and might want to be alone with her thoughts and/or nature, so she shut up.

Bev’s shoulders were strong and white in her tank top, and she walked quickly, with dutiful purpose, hitting the ground hard with every step. This was how she always walked. In a small shared living space it tended to seem like stomping, but on a hike it was appropriate. She seemed as if she knew where she was going, always, regardless of whether she did.

Twenty minutes later they were at the top of the hill. They peered out over miles of wooded landscape; the leaves were at the height of their greenness, some just starting to dry out or turn red at the edges. Down below was a river, and in the middle of the river there was some sort of wooden structure that had been overwhelmed by the water, maybe carried downstream. Butterflies flew all around them as they stood there resting before starting back down the hill. Amy supposed this was fun. Bev, at least, seemed to be having fun, in her determined way.

As they walked downhill, careful with every step not to slip on the rocks and twist their ankles, Amy’s thoughts finally drifted into a contented, daydreamy rhythm. For the first time in a long time she did not think about sex or a grudge or try to tease out a solution to a problem. They passed a tree that had been sliced in half by a thunderbolt. The brown leaves of the charred dead half were curling on the ground.

“Probably that thunderstorm on Friday,” Bev said.

“No way. Look how brown the leaves are. It’s definitely been down for longer than that,” Amy said. “Um. Obviously I know this due to being a forensic … botanist.”

Bev laughed, sincerely, and Amy loved her for it.

As they walked on in silence, Amy thought about trees. All this slow-motion life was happening constantly inside their trunks. A miraculous confluence of circumstances had led to these trees—of all the tiny seedlings that took root in the forest every year—growing up to be the ones that didn’t get eaten or trampled or killed by disease or lack of sunlight or uprooted to make way for a new path or crushed by an adult tree that had been hit by lightning. Tree infant mortality had to be something staggeringly close to one hundred percent, and then teenage trees probably faced a whole new set of problems.

How powerless the trees were! They got to make only one decision, and then they had to reap its consequences for their entire lives. On the plus side, though, they were relieved of the burden of having to make any further decisions. There was that to be said for being a tree.

When they got back to the house, it was already the low-blood-sugar shank of the day. Bev went out to do all the garden tasks while Amy sluggishly started washing and chopping vegetables for their dinner. She sang along to radio pop from Bev’s iTunes as she tore up lettuce. Bev came in from the yard, they consulted about the meal, and then she went back outside to light the grill. Amy took a cup of tea out to the living room and sat there with a book, unengrossed, looking up every few minutes and noticing something new about the room each time.

Beneath the cow-skin rug, there were dark and light types of wood inlaid in a geometric pattern in the floor. The chair opposite her was made of birch twigs but still looked comfortable. The curtains were made of a clean, worn-thin type of white cloth that looked like an apron someone might be wearing in a black-and-white photograph. Amy felt uncomfortable in the room, as if she were a misplaced detail amid all that precise beauty. The house she’d grown up in had been pleasant but unstylish: there had been furniture, of course, but almost none of it was beautiful or old or handmade. There was one glass-fronted cabinet that had been in her mother’s family for years, but its beauty was spoiled by the paperback books on its shelves, with their unattractive clashing spines: Civil War histories and Carl Hiaasen thrillers and joke books, the sources of young Amy’s haphazard early education. She remembered most vividly an early edition of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, a paperback of
The Prince
with her mom’s college notes in the margins, and a book called
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
.

A couple in a photograph on a low shelf caught Amy’s eye suddenly. It wasn’t a snapshot—there would never be such a gauche thing as a snapshot in a house like this one—but a posed informal portrait, the kind you’d see in an art or fashion magazine. The man was slight and Asian and almost shorter than the woman, who wore a pearl-gray dress with a wide sash at the waist. She looked sad, somehow, even though she was beaming.

These were the house’s owners. Amy picked up the photo and studied it for more clues. Was this from their wedding? How old had they been? They looked older than Amy, but not by much.

Amy was jealous of people who got married, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married. It wasn’t the party or the presents or the patently unrealistic promise of eternal love she craved, not at all. Well, maybe it was the party, slightly. It was more—well, it was a lot of things. For one thing, people who got married seemed to be granted special exemption from the otherwise ironclad law that after you stopped being a child, you had to give up your belief in magic. The spells and talismans of marriage—the vows, the rings, the veil—retained their mythic power, over Amy at least. It was maddening. But she couldn’t stop herself from caring, from being curious and jealous and moved when she saw these symbols, no matter how much she agreed with the pundits who attacked the institution on pragmatic and feminist and philosophical grounds, and no matter how many novels she read about the inevitable end of love.

Sam had been married once, in his early twenties, and that seemed to have sufficed for him.

Bev stomped inside and saw Amy holding the photo. There was a smudge of gray charcoal dust across her sweaty forehead. She looked over Amy’s shoulder at the photo. “Our hosts,” Bev said. “Is that from their wedding? She looks miserable.”

“I bet a lot of people are miserable at their weddings. Think of that pressure for one day to be perfect. I would have nonstop stress diarrhea.”

“I’d make sure you took some of my Klonopin.”

“A cocktail of Klonopin and Imodium. Perfect.”

“Glad that’s settled.”

They stared at the photo for another moment, then went to set the table with the beautiful hand-thrown plates and Riedel stemless wineglasses and heavy square-handled cutlery that had probably been given to the couple in the photo as wedding presents.

Later, ensconced in her cozy bedroom under vintage quilts in an antique bed, Amy took a chance on the flickering cell service and called Sam. He was still at the studio.

“The signal sucks out here. We have to be prepared to be cut off at any time, so you can’t say anything important,” Amy warned him.

“Okay, baby. Are you having a fun time? Waffles and I miss you very much. Waffles is expressing his sadness, actually, by licking my feet all the time. I don’t understand why he does this, baby. I think you aren’t a very good cat disciplinarian.”

“Don’t blame me for Waffles’s behavioral problems. I didn’t have him in his formative years. What are you working on?”

“That big Cuisinart. Painting the part now where you can see that the plastic is kind of smeary and grubby.”

“Did you eat dinner?”

“I had some chicken and broccoli. I’m turning into a health nut. Baby! What happened on the Internet today?”

He asked her this almost every day, like a parent asking a child “How was school?” And like a child telling a parent how school had been, she usually said something boring and noncommittal. How were you supposed to describe the millions of things that had happened? And all those micro events were so inconsequential on their own but so compelling in the moment. All of them were tricking you into thinking they might eventually add up to something, and maybe they would.